Power Trip

by McBride, Damian

  It was only years later that I discovered Gus had spoken to Gordon after that episode, told him I’d become too political and needed to be moved. It was put to me rather differently at the time by Ed Balls when he took me for a coffee in Le Club Express on Petty France:

  ‘If you want to carry on working for Gordon long term and see him through to No. 10, you can’t carry on as a civil servant. They won’t let you do his press work forever. So if Ian becomes an MP in May, Gordon would like you to take his place as the political press adviser.’

  There was a long pause. ‘But the reason I’m speaking to you, not Gordon, is he doesn’t understand what you’ll be giving up. You’ll never be able to go back to the civil service. Whatever career you thought you were going to have, that will be over. You’ll be taking a big, big risk. And if you don’t want to take it, you can tell me, and I’ll explain it to Gordon.’

  I asked Ed what he thought I should do. ‘All I know’, he said smiling, ‘is you seem to enjoy the work, and you seem to like the politics.’ Then, not for the last time, he said quietly: ‘And Gordon needs you. Without you, he’d be so exposed. So exposed.’ When I thought of that word, it conjured up the vulnerability of wealthy would-be divorcees without the legal protections of a pre-nuptial agreement. It didn’t make much sense at the time, and didn’t really until four years later.

  I should have taken longer to make up my mind, but I felt like I was part of Gordon’s Praetorian guard by then, and going over to the political side would cement that. However good the view, I knew that if I was back in the glass corner office at Customs earning the £100k salary, I’d just sit there depressed the whole time, like General Patton on D-Day.

  If I did have any doubts, they disappeared altogether during the course of the 2005 election campaign, when, by dint of my handling the media on the rescue package for staff at the threatened Rover car plant in Birmingham, I spent time with Gordon and Tony Blair as they mixed their government business with their electioneering in the last weeks before polling day.

  Part of my enthusiasm was seeing just how rubbish the No. 10 political team’s handling of the media was during the campaign, and thinking that I could do a much better job. That was reinforced by the total mess they got into trying to meet the competing demands of The Sun and the News of the World for a big exclusive interview.

  The Sun, edited by Rebekah Wade, thought they’d been promised the first joint interview of the campaign with Tony and Gordon, and were furious to hear that the News of the World, edited by Andy Coulson, had been given the interview instead. No. 10 tried to appease The Sun by offering an interview with Gordon on his own.

  That was fine, except Gordon had nothing particularly to say, and – as we were now in election purdah – he couldn’t rely on me or the Treasury to cook up an announcement. We waited in an aircraft tower in Birmingham as The Sun’s Trevor Kavanagh and George Pascoe-Watson landed in their special ‘election helicopter’. They weren’t in the best of moods, and they were even less pleased after thirty minutes of bland platitudes from Gordon about the dangers of voting for Michael Howard.

  Trevor was blunt enough to tell Gordon to his face that what he’d given them was totally unusable, while George rolled his eyes and told me the whole episode summed up what was wrong with Labour’s operation. Given the failure of the Gordon gambit, No. 10 were eventually reduced to giving The Sun Tony and Cherie’s first ever joint newspaper interview, leading to the unedifying headline that Britain’s Prime Minister was still up to having sex five times a night.

  The day of The Sun’s non-interview, our small Brown team travelled back to London in a Chinook helicopter with Blair’s much bigger entourage. Whether it was the constraints of space or not being able to hear each other talk, they all seemed a bit world weary. I said to Sue afterwards that they didn’t look like a team who were up for a full third term. ‘That’s because they’re not,’ she said – and this was all before the cash-for-honours scandal hit them the following year.

  Compared to the mood in Washington that black night a few months previously, our camp and Gordon personally were buoyant. He’d proved himself indispensable in the last few weeks of the election, so much so that when Alastair Campbell called to speak to Tony during the course of those days in the Midlands, Blair would simply hand the phone to Gordon and let him take all the decisions.

  At the end of one day in Birmingham, Gordon asked me if I’d ‘sorted things out’ with Ed about the job, and seemed genuinely pleased when I said I had. He also said admiringly that it was good of me to come up and help on the Rover story when everyone else was ‘having a good rest’ in the Treasury, lazy non-political civil servants that they were.

  I made the unforgivable error of telling him that it was worse than he thought. While I’d spent the day on the road with him, Michael Ellam, James Bowler, Mark Bowman and others had gone to play golf. ‘GOLF?!’ Gordon yelled. ‘GOLF?!’ If I’d said they’d been crocheting swastika cushions, he couldn’t have been more outraged.

  ‘We’re trying to run a bloody country here, and these guys are off playing golf!!’ Sue gave me one of the several variations on her ‘Now why on earth did you say that?’ look. Gordon went on about the errant golfers for the rest of the day, and wouldn’t let it go when he returned after the election, continually saying to Michael, James and Mark that he hoped they’d enjoyed their golf while he’d been away. They weren’t ecstatic with me.

  I spent election evening hosting a party at my house for Treasury staff. I’d joined the Labour Party two days previously, and was all ready to say goodbye to the civil service and go to the dark side. When the result came through from Dudley North that Ian Austin had been elected, I muted the TV, and announced to the room that I was becoming Gordon’s political press adviser and my deputy, a laconic genius named Paul Kissack, was becoming the new Head of Communications.

  The next morning, I walked away from orchestrating Gordon’s return into the Treasury for the cameras, applauded and cheered by all the staff, and walked down the corridor to Ian’s old office, a room looking out onto St James’s Park sitting next to the Chief Secretary’s office and two doors down from Gordon’s.

  Sitting on Ian’s old couch, watching his old telly, and getting to grips with the fact they were now mine, I picked up the bottle of wine he’d left on his desk for his successor, whether that had been me or his Tory opposite number. The accompanying note read: ‘Good Luck. Keep out of trouble. Keep out of the shot. And keep having fun.’

  I was itching to get into it, but it was a week before Tony Blair would agree to sign the forms accepting my appointment as a special adviser, making clear to Gordon that he wasn’t happy at the idea. Gordon gave me a dark look during those days of wrangling with Blair over the appointment, and said: ‘They really hate you over there. Some of the stuff they accuse you of doing is just…’

  He left the thought hanging. I just shrugged.

  MAD DOG ON THE LOOSE

  25

  BLAIR AND BROWN: THE COLA WARS

  The period between the election in May 2005 and Gordon’s succession to the premiership in June 2007 contained one of the most tumultuous fortnights in recent British political history, stuck between two large bookends of boredom, as Tony and Gordon maintained what is best described as a phoney peace.

  Of course, this was an improvement on what had come before. The ‘African Coup’ in autumn 2004 was followed in the New Year by the publication of Brown’s Britain by Robert Peston. One of the reasons Peston is such an exceptional journalist is that you get so frustrated with him saying he already knows everything you’re telling him that you end up dishing up all kinds of revelations simply in the hope of surprising him.

  I remember watching Gordon almost kill himself one night in a hotel room in India, when he sat down exhausted on his bed with such force that one of the supporting pillars of the huge, tall four-poster bed cracked. I barely had time to exchange a panicked look with the protection officer befo
re the thick brass beam that had been sticking into the top of the pillar came crashing down onto Gordon’s head with massive force. At the very least, I expected him to be knocked unconscious, but he just put his hand to his head, and said blithely: ‘Jeez, that’s not very safe.’

  I remember thinking that if I’d called Peston straight away to tell him that story, he’d have said: ‘Well I know, I mean I told him that was going to happen after he turned down the futon. But he just won’t listen.’ In any case, when it came to writing his biography, Peston clearly got Gordon in revelatory mood, and was able to reveal that he had recently told Tony: ‘There is nothing you could say to me now that I would ever believe.’

  Gordon’s utter sheepishness when the book emerged told us that he had indeed said far more to Peston than his discipline would normally have allowed, and – if we needed reminding – it told us what a dark place he had been in when doing those interviews with Peston the previous autumn. It was highly damaging for Blair given that his trust ratings with the public had already plummeted, and relations between the two men went into the deep freeze.

  There was no doubt in our minds then that, if Tony was able to see through his plan to win the 2005 election without Gordon’s involvement or assistance, he would be emboldened either to break up the Treasury and leave Gordon diminished and disempowered, or to offer Gordon a move to the Foreign Office and sack him if he refused.

  Gordon had privately reconciled himself to accept the latter outcome but resist the former, but at the same time he remained convinced that Tony couldn’t manage or win the election without him. And so it proved, with Alastair Campbell, Philip Gould and the two Eds coming together to agree the terms of the truce, signalled by Gordon and Tony sharing an ice cream during a joint campaign visit to Chatham, and then sweet nothings in a soft-focus party political broadcast by Anthony Minghella.

  By the time the election was out of the way, Gordon had seen off all attempts to curb the power of the Treasury by increasing the power of the Cabinet Office. The big decisions on NHS funding and the euro – which had genuinely divided them – had been made. Indeed, when Gordon used to say in speeches that it remained our intention to join the single currency when the conditions were right, it was almost treated by the press like a nice ironic gag.

  And while Gordon and Tony continued to disagree quite seriously and occasionally heatedly throughout this period on policies ranging from the EU Budget to the pensions system, there was only one major issue or fissure left between them: when was Blair going to go, and at what price?

  While the terms of a final truce, handover or surrender remained unresolved, the competing armies of spin-doctors and allies kept up their daily sniping across the border, with the occasional atrocity committed in each other’s villages. This, let me admit, was not a particularly edifying period for either side.

  For Tony’s mob, the message they wanted to convey was that Gordon was insufficiently committed to reform; too in hock to left-wing MPs and unions; unpopular with the swing voters in south-east marginals who had been crucial to Blair’s election victories; simply not New Labour enough to appeal to Middle England and not someone people could imagine standing up for their concerns or representing the country overseas. For some of the Blairites, that meant Gordon was the wrong man to take over; for others, it simply meant there was no way Tony could step down any time soon.

  By contrast, the message I wanted to convey was that Tony was hanging on to power for the sake of it, enjoying the trappings and the foreign jaunts and the long holidays; a lame duck within his own party, unable to get legislation through without Gordon’s support; and ultimately reliant on Gordon when it came to winning the election because the public no longer trusted him. Indeed, after the quickly abandoned experiment at the election with his so-called ‘sado-masochism strategy’, Tony had stopped even trying to convince the public. In other words, the sooner he went and let Gordon set out his own stall, the better.

  The tactics we used were fairly typical for each side. For me, it was leaking any proposals I came across which made Tony look a bit power crazed, promoting his acolytes to shore up his position or planning one last tilt at the windmills of the left; as well as briefing any story I could find – and there were many – which made Tony and his team look like they were enjoying the high life, entertaining ridiculous people in Downing Street, or working out how to feather their nests for the future. I’d also play on the fact that we couldn’t get a hearing in many quarters of the media any more because Tony and his team no longer cared what the Mail or the Telegraph wrote about Labour.

  For their part, the Blairites would write memos about Gordon’s ‘image problem’ and commission polling to show it was true, all designed to be leaked. They would play on him not looking prime ministerial, and not being at ease in his own skin. They would brief that every minor controversy around foundation hospitals or the academy programme was the new, ultimate test of Brown’s reformist credentials. And time and again, they would orchestrate speeches, policy launches and outspoken interviews by Blair’s so-called outriders – Alan Milburn, Stephen Byers, Charles Clarke and the like – attacking Gordon and questioning his succession.

  One of the first times I found myself publicly named by the press was when I emailed Sky News to offer them candidates to do the ‘before-and-after’ analysis of Gordon’s 2006 Pre-Budget Report and was told it had already been sorted; they had Milburn and Byers on. I fired back an angry email asking them how putting up two self-proclaimed opponents of Gordon to speak for Labour about the PBR was fair.

  I said it was like putting up Norman Scott’s dog – Rinka, Scott’s Great Dane, whose violent death was blamed on his lover, Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe, in 1975 – to speak for the Lib Dems. The email correspondence was leaked to the papers, and became a regularly quoted example of my robust approach. I didn’t mind that too much, but I did mind the fact that Blair’s operation never did anything to stop these characters openly attacking Gordon in public.

  Of course, they might have said the same about my activities, but that tells its own tale. While we operated in a different way – they leaked polls and memos, I leaked policy documents; they got Byers to knife Gordon, I gave the Telegraph material to knife Blair – I regarded my operations and theirs as equivalent, so it always baffled me when they claimed any moral high ground.

  A case in point was at the launch of Labour’s local election campaign in Docklands in April 2006: Gordon and Tony putting on a show of unity for the cameras by appearing together in front of a select audience of activists, volunteers and party workers.

  As the two of them walked down a narrow corridor to enter the main room where those supporters and a bank of cameras were waiting, I saw Tony’s staff stifling laughter as they walked behind. ‘Oh my God, what does he look like?’ one of them said. I looked ahead, and could see Gordon had clearly run his fingers through his thick, unwashed hair, and now had it sticking up like an outsize cockatoo, just as he was about to step in front of the cameras.

  I shouted: ‘Gordon! Stop! GORDON! STOP!’ He didn’t. I was desperate: ‘TONY!’ Blair turned round. ‘Stop Gordon, stop him there! Don’t let him go out!’ Tony did as asked, and I rushed forward, took Gordon into a side room and flattened out his hair. As I walked back out, Tony’s staff looked disgusted that I’d deemed to address ‘The Leader’ directly, let alone by his first name.

  I should explain that if you worked for Tony Blair in No. 10, you generally referred to him as ‘The Boss’, in the same way you referred to Downing Street as ‘The House’, two horrible affectations that people had picked up from the special protection officers, who at least had the excuse that the phrases were both short and anonymous if speaking in a hurry or in crowds.

  But if you didn’t work directly for Blair, civil servants were expected to refer to him as ‘The PM’, and non-No. 10 special advisers or party workers were expected to call him ‘The Leader’. We tried to abolish all those phrases when Go
rdon was in No. 10, in favour simply of ‘Gordon’. I was appalled to hear that, after taking over the party, Ed Miliband’s team reverted to an insistence on ‘The Leader’. Ugh.

  At that local elections launch, we’d agreed that Tony and Gordon would take questions from the attending journalists, and I’d assured the hacks I’d met in the morning that was the plan. When No. 10 unilaterally decided it wasn’t, it made me look like an idiot but also made us look complicit in their contempt for the press. So I gave Paul Waugh at the Standard a copy of the schedule for the day including the time set aside for media Q&A.

  No. 10 were furious about that, but I cared even less than normal, because the hair thing bugged me. At least a dozen No. 10 people ahead of me in that corridor could see that Gordon’s hair looked mental and the pictures would invite ridicule, but they seemed to relish the contrast with Tony looking perfectly coiffed and prime ministerial. Was it any worse for me to relish portraying Gordon as transparent and friendly to the media, while Blair looked aloof and evasive?

  Anyway, while all this sniping was going on, and on, and on, Gordon and Tony themselves were continuing to have their own private discussions about the succession, and in parallel, Campbell and Gould were meeting the Eds to talk about the practicalities, the policies and the process. But frankly it didn’t matter how constructive and amicable the advisers’ meetings were, if those between Gordon and Tony remained desultory and hostile.

  The Eds would come out of a meeting and cheerfully report back to Gordon that it was all going well; Gordon would come out of his and say that Blair had refused to talk about the handover at all, and just wanted to speak about pensions. There was the all too familiar sense for Gordon that, for all the public talk of a ‘stable and orderly transition’, Tony remained totally unreconciled to the idea, and it was just a matter of time before he did what he’d done in 2004, extended his planned end date, and further weakened Gordon’s hopes of ever taking over.